Universities 'should not rely on A-Level results'

A-Level grades cannot be relied on as an accurate measure of achievement or as a predictor of future performance, academics warned today.

While standards have been "broadly maintained", people had to understand that universities needed other evidence of an individual's abilities, argued Professors Dylan William and Paul Black of King's College, London.

In the 1970s, research by exam boards showed A-Levels were only accurate to plus or minus a grade, and they called on the Government to ensure this was updated - and then published.

The only way to make A-Levels accurate to a 10th of a grade either way would be to increase the amount of exams students had to take to about 40 hours for each subject, said Prof William, of KCL's Institute of Education.

As that was unlikely to be very popular with students, people would have to start trusting the judgments of teachers and university admissions tutors, he added.

Results are due out on Thursday but the annual row about whether the "gold standard" exam is being dumbed down has already begun.

In the face of criticism from the Institute of Directors and the Tories, school standards minister David Miliband insisted that A-Levels were as hard as ever.

Prof William said that grades may be improving because students were working harder and schools were increasingly "teaching to the test", covering only those parts of a course needed to get their candidates through.

He added: "Whether standards are going up or down is not the issue - standards have been broadly maintained."

"The problem is we just don't know how accurate examination grades are for individual students, and they are of only limited use as predictors of future performance."

An admissions tutor with one place to award and two students to choose from could toss a coin, which would give a 50-50 chance of identifying the candidate who would perform better at university, he said.

"By choosing the one with better A-Level grades, we would improve our chances of choosing the better student, but not by much.

"Such data as there are indicates that we would pick the better student only 60% of the time - 40% of the time, the student with worse A-Level grades would actually do better at university."

The A-Level exam could be used as a way of checking assessments by teachers for accuracy and evidence of bias against individual students, he said.

Meanwhile, some university admissions tutors were making more use of aptitude tests as a way of spotting potential, Prof William continued.

At King's College, for example, candidates usually needed two As and a B to study medicine, but nine state school pupils with Cs and Ds had been accepted on to the course because of their performance in science reasoning tests, he said.

Opponents of aptitude tests have said the evidence from the US was that they were biased against ethnic minority candidates, but that was also true of A-Levels, said Prof William.

"They are no better than A-Levels but they might pick up some different students," he added.

As universities sought to attract more working class undergraduates to meet Government targets, aptitude testing of one sort or another was likely to become more common.

People had to get used to the fact that a "basket of evidence" of achievement was needed for each candidate, Prof Williams said.

Joint Council for General Qualifications spokesman George Turnbull said that the exam system had changed radically since the 1970s, when markers had to award a quota of grades in each subject.

Those quotas no longer existed as any student that now met the criteria set down for it for had to be awarded a particular grade, he said.

Trying to compare the system then and now, following the introduction of AS-Levels and A2s, which together make up modern A-Levels, was like judging "Stanley Matthews against David Beckham", he added.

"What you can say is that standards last year are the standards this year, because that is what we maintain."